Monster

Giddy to march with soldiers again, Zepek guides the Holy Iron Chain Knights toward where he believes the Misty Valley lies, shouting commands until Serpico's warning about his reckless riding proves right and a root pitches him from the saddle. Unhurt, he leaps up and promises safe passage. Azan grows tearful imagining a father's love driving Zepek to rescue his daughter from the Black Swordsman, a reading Zepek sheepishly waves off. Farnese has the knights dismount and continue on foot, leaving the horses to the squires, while Zepek insists on staying with the column despite his bad leg.

A soldier's scream halts them at the sight of many stripped male bodies littering the woods off the trail. None of them realize these are the bug-men Guts slew, returned to human shape in death. Azan credits the Black Swordsman but assumes bandits helped, until Serpico, dropping his usual cheer, argues that a single wielder did it all. The gouges Azan took for cannon fire, he reasons, come from one gigantic blade too heavy for an ordinary arm, meaning only the freakishly powerful Guts could have swung it, which Zepek confirms. Trembling, Farnese seizes her sword hilt and vows to bring Guts to justice herself.

Within the blazing cocoon cavern, Guts sweeps aside the swarming elves with the broad flat of his weapon as the fire climbs. Rosine hurls endless waves at him until they overwhelm him, their pincer jaws locking onto his flesh. He lets every one of them bite down, then grins wildly and throws himself into the fire he lit, holding still just long enough for the flames to sear the small creatures dead. Ramming the Dragon Slayer up into a cocoon, he douses his own burns in the gush of fluid, while Rosine rages at a man who is, in his way, far more of a monster than she is.

Zepek leads the Holy Iron Chain Knights toward the Misty Valley. The knights find the human corpses of Guts' slain elves, and Serpico deduces Guts acted alone. Farnese vows to capture him. In the cave, Guts lets the elves bite him, then plunges into the fire to kill them all and extinguishes himself with a cocoon's fluids.

Published in Young Animal issue 23 on November 28, 1997, this twenty-page Conviction Arc chapter brings the pursuing Holy Iron Chain Knights into Guts' path while his duel with Rosine intensifies.